Spain and Brazil push global action to tax the super-rich and curb inequality

I hope this works. The only way to save the economy and the society is by taxing the rich.

Think about it for a minute. The rich people hoard all the resources, financial assets, means of production and in the competition for resources they will (and are doing so) displace everyone else in the economy (and really from society also).

This means that those who are displaced have no means to participate in the economy. And not only that but also they will be pushed to the fringes of the society and exists in slum conditions. This will stiff the economy and hollow it out.

Let's say for arguments sake that the government taxes X hundred of millions of $ from the bezos/musks/gates/etc. and put that into the economy by

  - indirectly or directly hiring people
  - building infrastructure
  - providing services for the citizens (education, health care etc)
  - providing benefits to those who need. 

All that money will immediately go back into the economy stimulating all kinds of economic activity. And essentially two weeks later that same X hundred million is back in the bank account of bezos/musk/gates and it can be taxed again!

By letting the uber rich hoard the wealth that wealth is essentially away from the economy providing very little economic activity.

In economy this is known as the "high propensity to spend". The "poor" (i.e. working/middle class people) have high propensity to spend, the rich have low propensity to spend.

Tax the wealth, not the work!

This has been done before and it can be done again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

> I hope this works.

It won't. Richest people in the world are exceedingly wealth, but they're not that wealthy. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't be taxed, they should, and much harder than is currently the case. We should move to remove the loop holes used and abused to make people like Bezos appear poor, in the eyes of the tax authorities, but it won't move much in terms of monetary value, because they're not that wealthy.

Let's tax Zuckerberg half of his wealth, that's roughly 2% of the US budget. That's a lot, but you can only do that once, maybe twice. You can certainly tax the wealthiest enough to fund quite a bit and if you pick the right things you can do a lot of good. It's just not enough to reshape society, which seems to be what most think would happen.

What I see as the biggest issue is the amount of societal damage these people are willing to do to amass their fortunes. I don't even care that Bezos is worth $250 billon, if he didn't exploit workers and deliberately destroys other business to accumulate that wealth. Same with Zuckerberg, he can be as rich as he likes, but he can't build that wealth of spying on users and generally being a dick. Musk... He can build all the cars and rockets he like, but stop undermining democracy through financial means.

Taxing billionaires hard won't stop their bad behaviour.

If the US government is 30 trillion dollars in debt someone is 30 trillion dollars in credit.

The money doesn't disappear. Now the problem is (in the context of United States) that the number #1 and #2 creditors are People's Republic of China and Japan. So the US cannot tax those entities.

But they can tax domestic creditors and wealthy individuals.

"Let's tax Zuckerberg half of his wealth, that's roughly 2% of the US budget. That's a lot, but you can only do that once, maybe twice. You can certainly tax the wealthiest enough to fund quite a bit and if you pick the right things you can do a lot of good. It's just not enough to reshape society, which seems to be what most think would happen."

No, the point is that you can do it over and over again.

Once you put that money into the economy it will flow all around it and most of the money will end up in the same place again. I.e in the bank account of Zuckerberg and it can be taxed again.

If we stick to Zuckerberg or Musk, a lot of their money isn't real, you can't really tax it directly. They'd have to offload a crazy amount of assets, including stocks. They'd lose a lot of their value if you had to sell it all of at once.

It's only real in the sense that they can use it as securities for loans or purchasing other assets. I'm not an economist, but it sounds like that would slow down the wealth generation of the riches people, and that would mean less taxable wealth next year.

You may be right. I still think address the increasingly egotistic and damaging behaviour would be better.

> I still think address the increasingly egotistic and damaging behaviour would be better.

If not by taxes, then how? Social pressure doesn't seem like it's working anymore, because individuals could just ignore that and still proceed like everything is normal. Genuinely curious about alternative solutions that doesn't involve taxation, since everyone seems to be so tax-avoidant.

Regulations and extremely high fines for breaking those regulation. In worst case, lose the right run a business in the future. The EU is getting closer to real fines, in terms of how large they need to be. The idea of using X% of turnover is good, but 4% isn't high enough.

In the case of companies like Amazon, force them to negotiate with unions.

How many Meta or Amazon size companies do you think the US government would need to shutdown for the industry to take notice? My guess is about two. Just close it down and let the shareholders take the lose. That way shareholders of other companies will insist that rules are followed. The government can sell of the assets and make some money that way.